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Forum:Cerberus Daily News templates
I've done a bit of thinking about this, and I believe that several new templates should be created in order to make it easier to find related articles, and to make it easier to change how all articles are displayed. The templates are summarized here: Template:CDNStory: has date, headline, and content parameters. Takes these parameters and formats the story. Template:CDNSeries: Allows for date-based linking between stories that belong to a series. (This template relies on some formatting that the CDNStory template does to work its magic. This template doesn't otherwise seem feasible to me.) Regarding the duplication issue: DynamicPageList2 is amazingly useful for copying content verbatim from another page. To that effect, we should be using it for the "Cerberus Daily News" main page. That page will include the most recent month's content directly from the archive. By doing this, an editor only has to add the story once, and have it replicated automatically on the front page. Two templates accomplish this: Template:CDNStories: Takes a "month year" parameter, uses this to pull all the stories from that month's archive. Template:CDNLatestStory: Also takes a "month year" parameter, and pulls the latest story from that month's archive. I have working implementations of these templates linked in my sandbox. If it looks like people want these templates, and more technically-minded folks don't see major problems with the code I have (I'm still quite new at this), then I'll move them to the Template namespace so they can be further edited, and eventually used. What do people think? Dammej 04:05, July 1, 2010 (UTC) Update: I've implemented the templates. Currently they reside at: , , and . Next we can think about making the stories more than a glorified blockquote... more on that later, methinks. :) Dammej 00:53, July 8, 2010 (UTC) Comments The idea seems a worthy one. I don't have the cycles at the moment to look at the implementation, but keep in mind that DPL can be quite expensive and front page uses of it should probably be kept to a minimum. That said, Wikia pays the bills, not me . --DRY 16:22, July 1, 2010 (UTC) It's been nearly a week here, and I've seen no comments other than DRY's. I don't think the DPL would be that intensive (its main purpose is to transclude the content of the latest archive into the "Cerberus Daily News" page.) I will admit that I have absolutely no way to demonstrate my claim though. Just my hand-wavey "well it's not scraping a bunch of pages" argument. :) If people don't -want- these templates, that's fine too. I just need people to say one way or another. I have no idea what people want if there's no communication about it. So if you have an opinion: speak up! Thanks :) Dammej 00:18, July 6, 2010 (UTC) :Well just to throw my two cents in, I really don't have much of an opinion either way, but different headlines would look nicer than "War Stories on Varien (30)" or something like that. I don't see too many people having a problem with it, and it would look nicer as well with out the whole, See also ... (and 34 other dates). Lancer1289 00:22, July 6, 2010 (UTC) ::Completely forgot about this. From what I've seen it looks like it's working. You've got my support. -- Commdor (Talk) 00:27, July 6, 2010 (UTC) It's been a week since the proposal, and I haven't seen any strenuous objection, so I'm going to pull the trigger. Moving the templates over and changing the article will take place over the next 30 minutes or so. Dammej 23:47, July 7, 2010 (UTC) :Looks awesome. Kudos for getting it to work. It seems like I'll be the one who does tonight's update, so we'll see in about 2 1/2 hours if I can handle the newness. :) -- Commdor (Talk) 01:24, July 8, 2010 (UTC) :Been away for a week so not had a chance to do any updating recently. Now that I'm back I just have to say...awesome template is awesome! Great job, Dammej. It looks a hell of a lot better now. FridgeRaider88 23:35, July 14, 2010 (UTC)